Posted in: Vita

Anyone who played the PSVita remake of Tales Of Innocence knew this was eventually going to happen. And now it’s official: the DS Japan-only RPG Tales Of Hearts it’s headed for PSVita as a full remake.
The plot device of the Triverse, introduced in Tales Of Innocence R, to tie the plots of the three DS entries of the series was quite an obvious hint that more remakes were coming. With the announcement of Tales Of Hearts R chances are high for a Tales Of The Tempest remake too.

The original Tales of Hearts has been released on December 2007 on Nintendo DS in Japan. Gameplay wise it’s not so different from the other entries in the series: players travel through the world visiting town, exploring dungeons and battling monsters. The battle system is the usual Tales Of Linear Motion Battle System where players can attack enemies with special techniques and magic spells in real time: the battle system in Tales Of Hearts is 2D based as characters sprites partecipating in battle can only move on the horizontal plane and so do enemies, a more refined version of the battle system used in the first 2D entries of the series.
The DS touch screen is used in some interesting ways during battle: player can assign characters’ battle techniques on 6 panels shown on the second screen and by tapping the panel the special attack will be performed even if that character is not currently partecipating in battle. This also lead to the possibility of special combination attacks and of summoning cameo characters from past games and some famous Namco characters like Klonoa and Heihachi Mishima.
The story in Tales Of Hearts is also very good and characters, while still close to the usual anime tropes, are nicely developed.

While the original game was a 2D-3D hybrid, Tales Of Hearts R will be completely 3D, running on the graphics engine used for Tales Of Innocence R. The scenario will be fully voiced with new story elements and content. A new character has already been revealed on the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump: Calcedony Arcome, a non playable character in the original, will be fully playable in the remake.

Tales Of Hearts R doesn’t have a precise release date yet: it will be available next spring in Japan. More details are coming in the next weeks.